Report from Presenter

The International Conference HI-POCT 2017 (IEEE-NIH Special Topic Conference on Healthcare Innovations and Point-of-Care Technologies) was held in the National Institute of Health (NIH) in Bethesda, USA, from Nov. 6-8, 2017. HI-POCT is an international conference sponsored by a consortium of Point of Care Testing (medical diagnostic testing at or near the patients), which was launched by IEEE (The Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers) in collaboration with NIH. Three keynote lectures were presented, and 67 invited speakers contributed to the discussion through panel sessions and the breakout sessions. In the technical sessions, there were 24 oral presentations and 78 poster presentations.

In our presentation entitled "Precise Dispensing Technology for Point-of-Care Diagnosis with Micro-Volume Blood", we proposed a high-precision dispensing technique for multi-panel tests from one drop of blood (Photo 1 & Fig. 1). Dispensing refers to dividing a liquid by a certain volume. Recently, we can measure the concentrations of components contained in even a small amount of blood due to the development of highly sensitive reagents and measuring techniques. When there are two or more test panels, it is necessary to precisely dispense a small amount of blood. However, it is difficult to dispose all of micro-volume blood sample with high precision since the blood has viscosity.

Here, we proposed a highly precise dispensing technique using electroformed tubes. When compared with conventionally used resin dispensing tubes, electroformed tubes have an inner diameter with high precision. Moreover, this dispensing technology does not require sample loss due to a movement of stainless plunger in tubes (Fig. 2). We also demonstrated that the dispensing precision improved by a surface treatment of the tubes, and the best value was within a variation range of 0.7 nanoliter in 100 nanoliter dispensing (a nanoliter refers to one billionth of a liter) (Fig. 3). Furthermore, by using this dispensing technique, the concentrations of glucose (blood sugar) and cholesterol were measured after a controlled blood sample was dispensed and mixed with a reagent. As the results, the variation of the measurements was about a few percentages (Fig. 4). These findings suggest that several test panels can be precisely measured even from one drop of blood.

A micro-volume blood test that reduces the physical and economic burden of patients is expected to be increasingly required in Japan, where aging is progressing at the fastest pace in the world. In the next step, we will develop a novel blood test device which incorporates a high-precision dispensing technology proposed in this presentation.